Memeorandum

April 26, 2009

CYA At The CIA

The LA Times presents yet another example of Bush boldly setting a course and then failing to follow through on pesky details:

Reporting from Washington -- The CIA used an arsenal of severe
interrogation techniques on imprisoned Al Qaeda suspects for nearly
seven years without seeking a rigorous assessment of whether the
methods were effective or necessary, according to current and former
U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

The
failure to conduct a comprehensive examination occurred despite calls
to do so as early as 2003. That year, the agency's inspector general
circulated drafts of a report that raised deep concerns about
waterboarding and other methods, and recommended a study by outside
experts on whether they worked.

It is not the natural way of bureaucracies to second-guess a program embraced by the top people.

We get a modest hint as to the second CIA memo Cheney was attempting to see declassified to buttress his case that the enhanced interrogation program was effective:

White House National Security Council officials who saw the inspector
general's report became concerned with its conclusions, current and
former officials said. Stephen Hadley, then the deputy national
security advisor, was particularly persistent on pushing the CIA
director to follow up on the inspector general's recommendation.

Goss,
who had taken the helm at the CIA four months after the inspector
general's report was filed, eventually complied. But Helgerson had
envisioned a group of experts, perhaps including specialists from the
FBI; Goss turned instead to two former government officials with little
background in interrogation.

Gardner Peckham, a national
security advisor to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, produced the
approximately 10-page document that praised the program. It concluded
that the program was "very structured and very disciplined," said a
former official familiar with its contents, but did not assess the
effectiveness of various methods.

A separate report, submitted
by John Hamre, a former deputy Defense secretary, was similar in scope
and led to no significant alterations of the program. Hamre and Peckham
both declined to comment.

The May 30 2005 OLC memo cites a March 2 2005 memo titled "Re: Effectiveness of the CIA Counterintelligence Interrogation Techniques" but that is not what Cheney requested. Instead, he asked for a June 1 2005 memo that is apparently 13 pages long.

Gardner Peckham, an adviser to then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich
(R-Ga.), concluded that the interrogation techniques had been
effective, said an intelligence official familiar with the result. John
J. Hamre, deputy defense secretary under President Bill Clinton,
offered a more ambiguous conclusion. Both declined to comment.

So, place your bets - I say that Cheney went with the more supportive Peckham memo, which means that the March 2 "Effectiveness" memo is by Hamre. And do note that, however ambiguous it was, even the Hamre memo had enough ammunition for the author of the May 30, 2005 OLC opinion (if this line of reasoning is accurate).

Comments

Notice that since OBAMA has decided to continue lobbing Hellfires on Pakistan, this part of Ms. Goodfellow's piece goes unmentioned:

"Tenet, according to half a dozen former intelligence officials, delegated most of the decision making on lethal action to the CIA's Counterterrorist Center. Killing an al Qaeda leader with a Hellfire missile fired from a remote-controlled drone might have been considered assassination in a prior era and therefore banned by law.

But after Sept. 11, four former government lawyers said, it was classified as an act of self-defense and therefore was not an assassination. "If it was an al Qaeda person, it wouldn't be an assassination," said one lawyer involved.

This month, Pakistani intelligence sources said, Hamza Rabia, a top operational planner for al Qaeda, was killed along with four others by a missile fired by U.S. operatives using an unmanned Predator drone, although there were conflicting reports on whether a missile was used. In May, another al Qaeda member, Haitham Yemeni, was reported killed by a Predator drone missile in northwest Pakistan.

Refining what constitutes an assassination was just one of many legal interpretations made by Bush administration lawyers. Time and again, the administration asked government lawyers to draw up new rules and reinterpret old ones to approve activities once banned or discouraged under the congressional reforms beginning in the 1970s, according to these officials and seven lawyers who once worked on these matters."

Following 'Krystallnacht' the Jewish 'problem', the Final Solution was designed by Reich lawyers who sought 'legal' means under cover of law to CYA Himmler against repercussions of law. At the Wannsee Conference, military higher-ups were briefed on the 'solution' to assuage any fears born by individuals charged with carrying out the orders.

The legal framework was staged, but German authority lost the limelight to Nuremberg.

Argue the 'effectiveness' diversion all you want. It doesn't change the legal definition of 'torture.

Let's also remember, Hamre was a member of the CLINTON team. As such, his failure to properly deal with A-Q after the Cole bombing, and other terrorist acts, most certainly must have been coloring his judgments.

Still, we are left with "Ambiguous" and not a thumbs down. I'd say that's about the best you could expect to get from a former Clintonista.

Acording to the ethos of the sanctified CHUCH Commission, Obama is committing extra-constitutional executions.By your standards, He and his administration need to stand in the dock right along side the Bushies.

"bu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be....Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics....And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States."

....Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. "I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each...target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

The rules of engagement are clear when it comes to the enemy. Collateral damage is not a war crime; waterboarding is.

A troubling aspect of the targeted assasination of young Pakistani muslims is the probability that stressful interrogation techniques were used in developing the intelligence which led to their killing. I would assume that President Obama would not order the killings of the suspects (and their wives, children and friends) without being satisfied as to the likelihood of their adherence to strongly held beliefs in a basic interpretation of muslim religious doctrine but I find the apparent conflict in his statements concerning muslim jihadism being a law enforcement problem and his authorizations to kill suspects to be at odds, especially if the information might be construed as "fruit of the forbidden tree" due to it having been elicited under duress.

SS-Oberführer Dr. Schongarth Security Police and SD
Commander of the Security Police
and the SD in the
Government General

SS-Sturmbannführer Dr. Lange Security Police and SD
Commander of the Security Police
and the SD for the General-District
Latvia, as deputy of the Commander
of the Security Police and the SD
for the Reich Commissariat "Eastland".

Note 1942 some years after "Krystallnacht".

The "military high-ups" do not seem to have been there.It was a planning meeting.

Let's see if I've got this straight. We know waterboarding is wicked because we executed Japanese for doing it in WWII; what we don't know is whether it's effective because no one called for an evaluation of this new and untried technique after 2003. Is that about right?

"Five years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, 60 percent of the knowledge of the U.S. intelligence community about Al Qaeda, its leadership structure and its operations came from enhanced interrogation techniques."

traditional interrogation was used in conjunction with EI. Which came first on the 60%? Perhaps Haydon has an axe to grind. (His own carcass?)

One of the critical questions in the debate over the CIA's use of harsh interrogation tactics is this: Did they work?

The case of Abu Zubaydah is often held up as the quintessential example of why enhanced interrogation techniques are a necessary evil. Former CIA director Michael Hayden said as much on Fox News last Sunday: "The critical information we got from Abu Zubaydah came after we began the EITs [enhanced interrogation techniques]."

Anchor Chris Wallace pressed him, "Not before?"

Hayden was emphatic. "No."

In a recent editorial, Hayden was even more specific. He claimed that the enhanced interrogation techniques led to the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

That said, one of Zubaydah's FBI interrogators, Ali Soufan, remembers it differently. Soufan wrote in The New York Times that Zubaydah talked without being coerced.

Two high-ranking former FBI sources remember it that way, too. They say that intelligence breakthroughs came before Zubaydah was subjected to harsh techniques, not after. Another person close to the interrogation, Rohan Gunaratna, has similar recollections. He is an al-Qaida expert who has worked with U.S. government agencies on terrorism issues."

"In the international world of Intelligence analysts, Sri Lanka-born slick performer Rohan Gunaratna had transformed into the ‘Temple Drum’ of Terrorism Industry. Until recently, he had been a staple contributor to the parochial press in Colombo (the Island newspaper) and Chennai (the Frontline magazine) spewing his intelligence on LTTE activities like a camel which spits when it is irritated. Thus it is heartening to see that in a few cities, investigative journalists have begun to size up the quality of ‘intelligence’ delivered by Gunaratna. The camouflage and cloak of this slick artist had been scruitinised, and Gary Hughes had produced an expose for the Melbourne Age newspaper on July 20th.

One should give the devil his due. The expose by Gary Hughes reveals that Gunaratna has some peculiar talent for (a) social climbing, (b) academic imposturing, (c) name dropping and (d) vita forgery, by puffing his vita with non-existing positions. To appreciate the expose of Gary Hughes, it would be helpful if one first reads how the Temple Drum of Terrorism Industry paraded himself as the Emperor of the Terrorism Analyst. A good example of such a performance was Gunaratna’s interview, which appeared in Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine of November 2002. Thus, in this assembled anthology on Rohan Gunaratna, I provide the following publicly available material in series, and follow it with an end note on Sri Lanka’s other con persons who made some wave in the past."

Oh, please, Leo. Waterboarding is not 'torture', its use was highly circumscribed and resulted in actionable intelligence which saved lives. You can flap your fingers 'til blood flows from underneath your nails without changing those facts.

Furthermore, Obama is setting himself up for severe second guessing once the next inevitable domestic terrorist attack comes. And believe me, someone in the CIA will leak the news that they were prevented from getting the necessary intelligence. Payback is a bitch.

Look how the CIA trashed a sitting President simply to cover their embarrassment at being so wrong about Iraq. Do you think they'll have any mercy for the President that has made their jobs exponentially harder and lives measurably riskier? Leo, the Dreamer.

I find the apparent conflict in his statements concerning muslim jihadism being a law enforcement problem and his authorizations to kill suspects to be at odds, especially if the information might be construed as "fruit of the forbidden tree" due to it having been elicited under duress.
To the contrary. It's all perfectly consistent. It's Chicago law enforceement, Ricky.

You mean you can't see the parallel to David Addington taking dictation from Cheney, then confabulating his torture memos to squeeze out some faux-constituional logic to make torture palatable to the inquisitors?

Yes, just remember Clarice, Republicans are Nazis, and all will be clear.

The putz has lost the argument, and will not address rendition and assassination by hellfire. Like pouring water on the wicked witch of the west. This latest goofy stuff is the equivalent of the WWW screeching "I'm melting" as she goes down into the puddle.

And I say no, it doesn't fit the legal definition of torture. Waterboarding is a smart bomb to the central nervous system. It is harmless and effective when time is of the essence. It should be highly regulated, as it was in the Bush Administration, and it should be safe, legal and rare.

A little info about the Church Committee. And please note dear readers, according to the Obama Administration, we are no longer dealing with a "WAR ON TERROR." And we are certainly not at war with Pakistan. And where in the law does it say we get to gun down common criminals with Hellfire missles?

Therefore, I demand that the Commander in Chief, under the new standards established by the Democrat Left, should be investigated by the Attorney General and brought up before some international tribunal, filled with sanctimonious European Socialist Bureaucrats for WAR CRIMES!

In their findings, the Church Committee stated that in the absence of war, assassination should be rejected as a tool of American foreign policy. The practice was “incompatible with American principle, international order, and morality,” it reasoned, and violated the “moral precepts fundamental to our way of life.” The Committee also suggested that it was probably inevitable that any plot hatched by U.S. officials would eventually be revealed because of the demonstrated inability of a democratic government to keep secrets.

Regardless of the success of the actual plot, such a disclosure would seriously harm U.S. foreign relations and incite retaliatory attempts on the lives of U.S. officials. The Committee concluded that the damage from such revelations “to American foreign policy, to the good name and reputation of the United States abroad, to the American people’s faith and support of its foreign government and its foreign policy, is incalculable.”

Somehow that has not been articulated well enough -- calling these "The Torture Memos" is actually quite prescient. You see, waterboarding is probably unique in two aspects: 1) it has all of the benefits of torture* without being torture, and 2) we have excellent historical data and long experience with it having used it on 25,000+ people already. Or, to the point, it was unique, in that it used to have the benefits of torture* until Obama released the memos. Now AQ has the requisite details to set up their own SERE school. So that the next time we must have something with the intelligence advantages of torture, we will be left with only one option: actual torture.

Barack Obama -- the 21st Century's first important facilitator of torture.

Compared to him, that little Julius and Ethel Rosenberg incident was a triffle.

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*ok, all of the legitimate benefits as far as intelligence collection.

Argue the 'effectiveness' diversion all you want. It doesn't change the legal definition of 'torture.

Which would be what, leo? can you quote it? Can you explain how waterboarding, in which there is no fear of being killed, loud music, and sleepless nights can be construed to come under that definition? With a straight face?

When you can come back with a definition that can't be construed, as Sullivan does, as anything that actually elicits information, and not to include, and Human Rights Watch tried a couple years ago, to include not having a private bathroom, get back to us.